Hope you enjoyed your time in the shadows skarner mains

Shadow Hazard·Oct 1, 2016·29 votes·1,514 views

That performance just put him on the bandwagon path. Makes for a nice I told you so that you can say to people who would keep saying that he isn't good.

18 Comments

Sightless66Oct 1, 201617 votes

It's almost as if Skarner having the highest jungler winrate for months now wasn't a coincidence. Shocking.

Personally, I welcome the inevitable nerfs. Once he stops being so strong, he'll go back down to his comfortable bottom 5 pickrate, and then maybe that will spur Riot into reinitiating the Skarner rework cycle for the fourth time. Maybe then we'll finally get rid of these stupid spires.

SpoofghoulOct 1, 20163 votes

{quoted}

Maybe then we'll finally get rid of these stupid spires.

oh boy wouldn't that be awesome news

Ronin OneOct 2, 20161 votes

I think the problem is tri force. I almost never saw a Skarner until those tri force changes. Then everyone started playing him and hecarim again.

TheSingularityOct 2, 20161 votes

YAY!!!!! I found a friend who agrees with me. What would you prefer? A brand new fully fledged rework or for them to revert the current one?

Sightless66Oct 2, 20161 votes

I'd prefer a brand new one, and a large one at that. All of his previous reworks been disappointments to me. I actually agreed with Riot that he didn't have any specific purpose in any of them, and he needs something unique beyond his ultimate (although the shrines were an extremely boring and forced way of doing that). The permaslow gave him something unique and valuable, and a specific strategic purpose. Since then, he's just been a lock-standard autoattack bruiser who only gets a real high moment when he ults someone.

If you ask me, his basic abilities just aren't cutting it. Q hasn't been really cool since the permaslow was gone. It's gone from having a very interesting permaslow, to having some effect on ramping him up early in a fight, to just doing more damage when you jam Q as fast as you possibly can. The E is a strong contender for the most boring basic ability in the game, which makes the fact that it's the most impactful of his basic abilities very annoying. Nothing but the ult is cool anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while.

I just don't want to see Riot remove the shrines and replace it with something else. I don't think changing his passive is going to fix anything. It will still leave him with a dull basic kit that will only see play when he's blatantly overpowered. He needs new abilities, and that means a larger rework than any of the lazy, "do as little as possible" work that he's had before.

TheSingularityOct 3, 20161 votes

Didn't like his old crystal venom passive? I found it rather fitting given it didn't; Lock his viability to the jungle Gave him a high moment of ms/as every 3 hits. An easy to apply but harder to proc stun. Provided a decision to be made, proc ult on passive for more dmg or stun them to ensure success.

But 100% agree on the spires being forced. I fear that they'll throw in some tacky mechanic to replace it that's... just kinda there ya know?

I tried brain storming with a bunch of felas but nothing we came up with for a spire replacement sounded better than the old venom passive

Sightless66Oct 3, 20162 votes

Didn't like his old crystal venom passive?

Nope. I understand that you do, and I can respect that, but I'll warn you right now that I'm going to spend the rest of my post explaining exactly why I found that particular passive so boring.

I thought it was generally dull. It didn't provide any strategic reason to want Skarner over any other champion, and it didn't have any interesting mechanics that made it feel interesting and cool to use. It was strong enough to work, but he definitely deserved his bottom 4 pickrate when he had that passive. If I'm honest, even the spires feel like a small step up from that. At least they are occasionally interesting. I sometimes have a cool moment with the spires, rare as they are. Can't say the crystal venom ever felt even a little cool to me.

I just did not like that rework at all. The first rework was the worst by far, but the second only applied a bandaid to the metaphorical arterial bleed. It didn't really do anything to help. The third rework may have fucked up by adding the spires, but I appreciate that it at least tried to give him something new and interesting to do, even if it ended up failing.

Gave him a high moment of ms/as every 3 hits.

As far as ramping power mechanics go, that's about as mechanically basic as you can get. He goes from an autoattacking bruiser who spams Q and W without stacks, to a slightly better autoattacking bruiser who spams Q and W. Not cool. It was just a very inelegant way to backload power.

Besides, if all I cared about was having some movement speed and attack speed as I fought, then having the spire passive applying to his E proc would have been enough to satisfy me.

An easy to apply but harder to proc stun.

This was the only even slightly interesting part of the old passive, and it really just another way of backloading power and guaranteeing that he couldn't follow up his ult with more strong CC. It was an ok mechanic, but it wasn't anything special. I need something better than that, particularly if the Q and E aren't going to majorly change.

Provided a decision to be made, proc ult on passive for more dmg or stun them to ensure success.

That decision was incredibly binary, generally unimportant, and was almost always overshadowed by the question of "when do I need the ult's CC". It met the very bare minimum standard for what constituted a decision. It was a D- effort. That's not good enough.

I tried brain storming with a bunch of felas but nothing we came up with for a spire replacement sounded better than the old venom passive

Personally, I think the best option is complete deletion of one or more of his current abilities and replacement with entirely new ones, and reconsideration of the others. His Q and E are not compelling or interesting mechanics. They can stand for complete replacement or major reworking. At that point, his passive could be reworked into something that would fit his new kit.

Doing too little and only trying to replace the passive is what got him into this mess. It's the reason why every rework has been a failure. Laziness got Riot into this hole. If they default to being lazy the next time they rework him, it will have the same result.

TheSingularityOct 3, 20161 votes

Fair points, I can see where you're coming from. Guess it was just good enough for me since it felt like a naut passive (naut jg main) so never really saw it from that perspective.

All we can do now doe is wait and hope he gets a good rework next year (maybe during a vanguard update)

IPromiseTomorrowOct 1, 20163 votes

So prepare for nerfs lol Rito loves nerfing uncommon champs who suceed. :^(

WheatloafOct 1, 20162 votes

Some champions are way slower to be picked up by bandwagoners than others. Then there are Vayne and Yasuo, who could be grossly underpowered, but the second they get within 500km of pro play everyone and their mom's playing them.

DracocrashOct 1, 20162 votes

he was my freelo. I have over a 70% winrate with him in ranked and he got me all the way from silver 4 to gold 5. I dont know why people dont abuse this freelo lol.

SaphixiaOct 1, 20161 votes

He is my freelo champion to get out of bronze, Ban amumu and gg

Just Blame JennyOct 1, 20161 votes

Ironically, I don't think I've seen a single Skarner these past few weeks. It's weird because, yeah, he's currently really strong. Is he just that uninteresting as a champion?

SpecterVonBarenOct 1, 20161 votes

Yes. The rework did nothing to give him a niche and just toke away his identity of being a sticky inescapable monster.

Big LincolnOct 1, 20161 votes

Skarner's one of the most boring champions ever made, in my opinion. He's very bland with no real nuance or niche, and his main contribution to teams is his ult.

There's just not really that much do with... a rock scorpion. He'd probably be more interesting as an assassin in my opinion, but Riot's focused on making him a tank whenever they get around to yet another rework, so I wouldn't keep my hopes up.

MogarlOct 1, 20161 votes

I didn't stop playing him because he was weak. I stopped playing him because I no longer found him enjoyable to play.

AFK PushOct 1, 20161 votes

I feel sorry for you guys he goes from being considered garbage to the next fotm pick every few months.

AstôlfoOct 1, 20161 votes

Eh, not a Skarner player, but anyways. He's pretty much always been strong, he just wasn't in meta for most part due to mobility creep, and thus underplayed.